The Club First Look

Earlier today, at its 2007 Spring Gamers Day event in San Francisco, Sega gave us our first look at The Club on the Xbox 360. Also in development for the PlayStation 3 and the PC, The Club is an arcade-style third-person shooter that appears to borrow more than a few gameplay mechanics from developer Bizarre Creations' popular Project Gotham series of racing games. The storyline revolves around an underground blood sport in which trained killers are tasked with fighting their way through various locales around the world to amuse wealthy and influential, though faceless, audiences. Based on what we've seen today, said premise won't figure prominently in The Club; rather, it's simply an excuse to have an eclectic cast of armed-to-the-teeth characters indulge in fast-paced, action-packed shootouts in locations they really have no business visiting in the first place.

The Club will feature a roster of eight playable characters, most of whom are being kept under wraps for the moment. Those we were afforded brief glimpses of during our presentation included an escaped Russian prisoner named Dragov, a former New York cop named Renwick, a gambler with life-threatening debts, an extreme sports junkie, and a mysterious character whose face was almost completely hidden under a hood. Each of the characters will purportedly play quite differently as a result of their individual speed, strength, and stamina attributes, as well as other factors that aren't being disclosed just yet. For the duration of our presentation, the game's design manager from Bizarre Creations was playing the single-player game as Renwick, showing off two of the game's eight levels as he did so.

First up was a quick tour of the "Prison Cells" level, which bore a strong resemblance to Alcatraz--albeit with many more exploding barrels. Evidently, your goals in The Club will be very similar to those in the Project Gotham Racing games. In other words, you'll try to get to the finish as quickly as possible, and en route you'll try to earn bonuses for style and stringing together combos. The combos are composed of kills rather than powerslides, of course, and the style points will come from headshots and multikill explosions rather than well-taken corners, but you get the idea. Skull tokens scattered throughout the levels will afford you an opportunity to keep your combos going while taking a very brief break from the otherwise nonstop action, and we suspect that in some cases finding them will be the only way to prevent your score-multiplier combo bonus from taking a hit when there are no enemies left in the vicinity. The other level that we saw a small portion of was "Venice," which was similarly gritty in appearance and looked more like a sewer system beneath the city than its famous canals. The remaining locales that you'll be shooting your way through will include a steel mill, a warehouse, a disused ocean liner, a war zone, a bunker, and a manor house.

Most of the enemies that you kill in The Club will leave their weapons behind for you to pick up, and we're told that the game's arsenal will boast at least 17 different firearms for you to play with. Those that we noticed during today's presentation included the Austrian Steyr Aug assault rifle, the Italian SPAS-12 semiautomatic shotgun, the American M60 machine gun, and the AK-74 assault rifle from the Soviet Union. We're told that high-caliber pistols, sniper rifles, and mounted weapons will also figure in The Club, and that you'll be able to earn significant point bonuses by using weapons appropriately.

Since we weren't allowed to play The Club ourselves on this occasion, we couldn't get a feel for its controls. We can tell you that you'll have access to a sprint button and that the left and right triggers will be used for zooming in (when stationary) and for shooting, respectively; but other than that, all we were told is that the controls are "pretty standard" for a third-person shooter. You will be able to take cover, incidentally, though our understanding is that, at least in the single-player game, doing so will almost certainly be a last resort because it slows you down and loses you points.

Bizarre Creations isn't talking about The Club's multiplayer features for the moment, but the fact sheet that we were handed mentions support for up to 16 players online and up to four players on a single screen if you have the Xbox 360 or PS3 version. The PC game won't feature offline multiplayer of any kind. We look forward to bringing you more information on The Club, which is currently scheduled for release "this winter," as soon as it becomes available.